Brocade Grew its SAN Market Share by 3% in 1Q08

Brocade announced strong customer response and third-party analysis that demonstrate significant strides in market adoption of Brocade’s Data Center Fabric architecture and the use of Brocade’s DCX Backbone to meet the demands of their next-generation data center.

According to the latest market share data from Dell’Oro Group, in calendar Q1 ’08 Brocade grew its overall storage area networking revenue market share by nearly three percent, while other competitors declined. In addition, according to Dell’Oro, Brocade’s market share in the modular (director) segment climbed 5.5 percent over calendar quarter Q4 ’07.

"Brocade’s Data Center Fabric architecture is generating enthusiastic support from our customers as evidenced by our company’s strongest market share position in the high-end of the storage networking market," said Ian Whiting, Vice President and General Manager of the Brocade Data Center Infrastructure Division. "Brocade continues to lead the data center networking market by delivering real-world, high-performance solutions that meet the challenges of consolidating and virtualizing their IT operations today, but with a clear, differentiated investment-protection strategy that will provide sensible and realistic upgrade paths to emerging data center technologies."

European communication service provider KPN is deploying six Brocade DCX Backbones in data centers in Rotterdam and Groningen, part of an expansion plan designed to accommodate the growing data management demands of more than 35.3 million KPN mobile, wireless and broadband Internet customers in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

"With 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel bandwidth, the Brocade DCX Backbone is the fastest solution available and will seamlessly integrate with our existing infrastructure," said Germar Braam, Lead Architect at KPN. "It’s the only platform on the market today that can provide a smooth transition to future technologies, such as Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), without the need to rip and replace our core network infrastructure."

In late January Brocade launched the Brocade DCX Backbone, the first in a new class of high-performance data center networking products designed to enable the Brocade DCF architecture. DCF is an open framework that allows customers to evolve their data center infrastructures for maximum performance, flexibility, and investment protection. On May 13, the company augmented the DCX with the announcement of an entire range of new fabric switch products based on the same technology.

According to Brocade’s most recent earnings call on May 15, 2008, in only three months of general availability from Brocade and its OEM partners, The Brocade DCX has outpaced the ramps of all of Brocade’s previous high-end product offerings and contributed to another third consecutive quarter of record revenue quarter for Brocade directors.